By now you've probably heard or read about Vista's User Account Control (UAC). This feature alone has taken the brunt of much criticism and has created much consternation among Vista end-users.
In fact, users of Vista have an option to disable UAC entirely. Microsoft will maintain that UAC is functioning as it should--to get in the way of any attempt at elevating user privilege legitimate or otherwise even at the risk of degrading usability and the overall user experience. It's all about security and how Microsoft's Vista implements enhanced security in an effort to put in the past some of the Windows single-user legacy issues that Windows XP inherited and really never was designed to adequately address.
Microsoft is so confident they believe other O/Ses should follow suit and recently took the position that UAC is designed to annoy you. Ed Bott of ZDNet, punctuates with Dear Microsoft: Please get UAC right this time, and brings probably the most veracity to understanding any and all issues around Vista.
From my perspective, if I am doing something that annoys me, I'll probably stop doing it or find a way of avoiding it entirely. Making the case that 'annoyance' was intentionally designed in troubles me and I find it to be less than sincere.
openSUSE GNU/Linux and other Distros make use of sudo. Sudo does only what it's supposed to do and does it well--it's flexible, you can't by-pass or disable it, and, most of all, it doesn't annoy.
Your thoughts?
In fact, users of Vista have an option to disable UAC entirely. Microsoft will maintain that UAC is functioning as it should--to get in the way of any attempt at elevating user privilege legitimate or otherwise even at the risk of degrading usability and the overall user experience. It's all about security and how Microsoft's Vista implements enhanced security in an effort to put in the past some of the Windows single-user legacy issues that Windows XP inherited and really never was designed to adequately address.
Microsoft is so confident they believe other O/Ses should follow suit and recently took the position that UAC is designed to annoy you. Ed Bott of ZDNet, punctuates with Dear Microsoft: Please get UAC right this time, and brings probably the most veracity to understanding any and all issues around Vista.
From my perspective, if I am doing something that annoys me, I'll probably stop doing it or find a way of avoiding it entirely. Making the case that 'annoyance' was intentionally designed in troubles me and I find it to be less than sincere.
openSUSE GNU/Linux and other Distros make use of sudo. Sudo does only what it's supposed to do and does it well--it's flexible, you can't by-pass or disable it, and, most of all, it doesn't annoy.
Your thoughts?
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There were many of these blogs on ZDNet - however they all deteriorated into the black & white Linux-good Microsoft-bad comments - completely useless for any type of information.
Normally, i just find out how to do something then do it. It wasn't until all the comments about UAC did i think about the subject.
- it is annoying to go to the trouble of ""run as administrator"" and then be asked if i really want to
I don't understand the MS logic behind ""restricted"" commands - why didn't they lock certain commands to administrators only and force a logon to different credentials. They could easily do this with "fast user switching"
As it is everyone sets their account as ""administrator"" because it does not seem to make any difference.
Microsoft would have you believe that UAC is operating as it should. Perhaps it was designed by commitee--a very large one?
I googled around for UAC/sudo comparisons and stumbled across a Microsoft presentation of the differences found between Microsoft Server 2008 (shares the same SP1 kernel as Vista) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/compare/webcasts/windows-uac-compared-to-linux-sudo.mspx
You can draw your own conclusions, but I found the presentation to be 'slanted' and suggests that Linux is somehow 'disadvantaged' in application of sudo. Not Really. A system administrator who does poor planning on any system risks 'poor' results.
Thanks B
--dietrich